As the popularity of digital cameras grows, the desire of digital camera users to share their images with others will also continue to grow. The best approaches to photo-sharing take advantage of the Internet. Several Internet companies now offer an even more convenient approach by providing photo-sharing websites that allow users to store their images for free and to arrange the images into web-based photo albums. Once posted on a photo-sharing website, others may view the images over the Internet.
The assignee of the present invention has developed a system for uploading images to the Internet, directly from the camera, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,259 entitled “Automatically Configuring A Web-Enabled Digital Camera To Access The Internet” issued on Oct. 21, 2003.
In this system, cameras connect to a gateway server on the Internet via a service provider, which may include a wireless carrier and/or an Internet service provider (ISP). In order to create a camera that requires no configuration to connect to the Internet, the camera is provided with a software application that is pre-configured to establish communication with the ISP and the gateway server. Upon establishing a connection, the camera sends the user's account ID and password to the gateway server. The user account information is then stored on the camera for use the next time the electronic device accesses the website. Thus, the user does not have to enter account information in order to establish the ISP connection or the website account before accessing the Internet.
The gateway performs two basic services for the client. First, it is the camera's home base, which provides authentication services (user and device) and configuration services (it updates the camera's configuration, so the user doesn't have to). Second, it receives and responds to the camera application's requests using a protocol both understand. Services available to a camera may include the ability to send images from the camera to a specific photo-service service and the ability to send emails with links to uploaded images.
The current gateway solution is built on traditional client-server architecture, where a software application on the camera communicates with a software application on the server. Client-server architecture requires custom software on all three tiers of the current architecture; the camera, the gateway, and the photo-service site. In addition, the current gateway solution only enables communication with digital cameras, not other mobile devices.
A newer model for application deployment on the Internet today is server-based (i.e., ASP model), where a client device equipped with a web browser communicates with a web server. Browser-based devices simply download web pages from the server, which provides the application function and data. The deployment of web applications using this new server-based architecture is growing much faster than the deployment of client-server based applications because browser-based clients do not require a gateway that “speaks” the client application's protocol. Thus, browser-based clients may connect to the photo-service sites directly, since the devices are browser-based. In addition, browser-based clients also do not require embedded custom software for requesting imaging services from the photo-service sites. Instead, once connected, users of these devices could interact with the photo-services sites directly using the device's browser to display web applications from the photo-service sites if the sites support the specific browsers in these devices, or indirectly via a transcoding gateway.
A transcoding gateway converts the sites' HTML to a format suitable for the various browser types. Transcoding products exist today that can support multiple browser-based clients that are both wireless and wired. Transcoding technology takes a formatted input stream (typically HTML) from a web server and converts it to an output stream in another format (e.g., WML for WAP phones, cHTML for i-mode phones, etc) of a particular type of browser-based device. Digital cameras will soon be equipped with browsers, just as PDA's and cellphones are, and such transcoding products allow, or soon will allow, browser-based devices to access the images and image services of photo-services sites.
There are two main problems with equipping digital cameras with web browsers for communication with photo-service sites and for running their web applications. One problem is making the presentation of the web applications palatable to the various types of browser-based devices, given the variety of display characteristics and browser technologies. There are two approaches to addressing this presentation problem.
One approach is for each photo-service site to build custom web pages for each specific device/browser type. That is, the photo-service site would need to provide web pages formatted in HTML, WML, cHTML, and so on, and preprocess images to suit the device display capabilities. This is both labor intensive to initially setup and difficult to maintain as changes are made to the site's data and services.
A second approach is to use a transcoding product, such as a WAP gateway or Oracle's Portal-to-Go. The problem with the transcoder approach is that it tries to solve a very broad problem, making all HTML encoded information presentable in a number of other different formats. Consequently, transcoders often produce unsatisfactory results. Transcoders thus serve as a temporary solution while photo-service sites build support for each of the various devices directly into their sites.
As digital imaging grows in popularity, there will be a need for disparate photo-service sites to integrate their offerings (e.g., photo-hosting from one, and printing from another). This requires that two photo sites wishing to become partners must each enable their sites to communicate. Neither of the two approaches described above addresses the requirement of integrating the services that span the sites of multiple photo-service providers. Since there is no standard for inter-site communication for photo-service sites, this effort must be undertaken for each new partner a site agrees to work with.
The second problem with equipping digital cameras with web browsers for displaying web applications from photo-service sites is the limitations inherent in web browsers, which is that browsers typically do not allow web applications to have access to content of the requesting device. Using a PC environment as an example, assume a user wants to upload images to a photo-sharing site on the Internet using a browser. To upload images, the user navigates to the photo sharing site and clicks an “upload” button. In response, the photo sharing site sends an upload web page to the user's PC. Because the web browser does not allow the upload web page to access to the hard drive, the upload page displays several blank image name fields for the user to fill-in. If the user does not know the names of the images, the user must click a “browse” button on the web page in order to search the directories on the PC for the desired image files. Once the user navigates to the correct directory and selects one of the images files, the name of the image file is then inserted into one of the image name fields on the web page. The process is then repeated for each image the user wants to have uploaded.
Due to limitations imposed by web browsers on web applications with respect to the ability to access the internal storage of the requesting device, the process of manipulating images over the Internet via web browsers is burdensome and inefficient.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for integrating web photo-services for browser-enabled client devices. The present invention addresses such a need.